How to Tell War Stories

Here’s how I met Nick Turse. I have a friend who’s a professor of public health and one day in 2003 he asked me if I’d be willing to spend a little time with one of his graduate students who was doing some curious work on the Vietnam War. This student had read my book The End of Victory Culture, a history of the Cold War era that had a significant Vietnam component, and was eager to get together with me. One morning a week or two later, at the local diner near my apartment, I met this scraggly kid lugging a giant army surplus rucksack stuffed to the brim with god-knew-what. And it was true. Though born the year the Vietnam War ended, he did indeed know an inordinate amount about that conflict and had, he told me, stumbled upon a trove of forgotten files at the National Archives from a secret Vietnam-era Pentagon working group investigating U.S. war crimes. Those files, he added, were both sobering and startlingly extensive and they had been carefully buried at war’s end. It was the subject of his dissertation.

I must admit I only half paid attention. Not long after, he started sending me little TomDispatch-like emails he was circulating to friends. At first, I barely glanced at them, but — whatever “it” is — he had it and that included an incredible eye for strange war toys, odd military research, and bizarre Pentagon weapons programs. After a while, I found myself compulsively reading those idiosyncratic emails of his. Finally, I picked up the phone and suggested he turn one of them into a TD piece — and so he did. On October 16, 2003, I published “Zap, Zap, You’re Dead,” an article on militarized video games, and our collaboration has never ended.

A couple of years later, I got him to turn his Pentagon research into The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives for the American Empire Project series I co-run with Steve Fraser. In the meantime, that dissertation of his, compounded by years of further research in Vietnam and here, was slowly being transformed into what became Kill Anything that Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam. Over that period, both as his editor and a friend, I’ve witnessed his obsessional journey, a genuine odyssey, through a nightmarish landscape of war and crime long buried, like those Pentagon files, in the memories of American veterans and Vietnamese peasants. He spent years tracking down and interviewing those who had committed war crimes, those who tried to expose them, and those who suffered from them. At the same time, he was working to grasp the nature of the American way of war in Vietnam that had made all this possible.

I knew something about what had already been written on that war here (though nobody could begin to read the 30,000 books that have poured out since that disaster of a conflict ended), and I had no doubt that his would be unique. I knew something else as well: that Americans had, since 1973, been remarkably uninterested in the war crimes their troops had committed there and so I expected one of the great books on that war to disappear more or less without a trace, no matter when it came out.

Most of the time, being wrong is, at best, an uncomfortable experience. Every now and then, though, it’s a wonder. So it’s been with his book. Instead of instantly heading down the tubes, it landed on the New York Timesextended bestseller list, is being widely reviewed, and is now in its fifth printing. Nick has appeared on shows ranging from Fresh Air and Democracy Now! to Moyers & Company. Letters filled with terrifying memories from Vietnam vets, who have lived all these decades with their private nightmares, have been pouring in, offering powerful confirmation of what he’s written and enough new material for him to write volume two, if he ever wants.

Undoubtedly, this is an odd way to introduce his post for today, a sobering look at what we’re never told about war, but I wanted TomDispatch readers to know just how proud I am of Nick for not stopping, not caring what the future might hold, and especially for keeping faith with those, American and Vietnamese, who suffered grievously. Tom

Who Did You Rape in the War, Daddy?A Question for Veterans that Needs AnsweringBy Nick Turse

On August 31, 1969, a rape was committed in Vietnam. Maybe numerous rapes were committed there that day, but this was a rare one involving American GIs that actually made its way into the military justice system.

And that wasn’t the only thing that set it apart.

War is obscene. I mean that in every sense of the word. Some veterans will tell you that you can’t know war if you haven’t served in one, if you haven’t seen combat. These are often the same guys who won’t tell you the truths that they know about war and who never think to blame themselves in any way for our collective ignorance.

The truth is, you actually can know a lot about war without fighting in one. It just isn’t the sort of knowledge that’s easy to come by.

There are more than 30,000 books on the Vietnam War in print. There are volumes on the decision-making of Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, grand biographies of Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh, rafts of memoirs by American soldiers — some staggeringly well-written, many not — and plenty of disposable paperbacks about snipers, medics, and field Marines. I can tell you from experience that if you read a few dozen of the best of them, you can get a fairly good idea about what that war was really like. Maybe not perfect knowledge, but a reasonable picture anyway. Or you can read several hundred of the middling-to-poor books and, if you pay special attention to the few real truths buried in all the run-of-the-mill war stories, you’ll still get some feeling for war American-style.

The main problem with most of those books is the complete lack of Vietnamese voices. The Vietnam War killed more than 58,000 Americans. That’s a lot of people and a lot of heartache. It deserves attention. But it killed several million Vietnamese and severely affected — and I mean severely — the lives of many millions more. That deserves a whole lot more focus.

Missing in Action (From Our Histories)

From American histories, you would think the primary feature of the Vietnam War was combat. It wasn’t. Suffering was the main characteristic of the war in Southeast Asia. Millions of Vietnamese suffered: injuries and deaths, loss, privation, hunger, dislocation, house burnings, detention, imprisonment, and torture. Some experienced one or another of these every day for years on end. That’s suffering beyond the capacity of even our ablest writers to capture in a single book.

Unfortunately, however, that’s not the problem. The problem is that almost no one has tried. Vietnamese are bit characters in American histories of the war, Vietnamese civilians most of all. Americans who tromped, humped, and slogged through Vietnam on one-year tours of duty are invariably the focus of those histories, while Vietnamese who endured a decade or even decades of war remain, at best, in the background or almost totally missing. (And by the way, it’s no less true for most of the major movies about the war. Remember the Vietnamese main characters in Apocalypse Now? Platoon? Full MetalJacket? Hamburger Hill? Me neither.)

The reasons for this are many and varied, ranging from racism and ethnocentrism to pure financial calculation. Few Americans want to read real stories about foreign civilians caught up in America’s wars. Almost no one wants to read an encyclopedia of atrocities or a tome-like chronology of suffering. And most Americans, above all, have never wanted to know the grotesque truths of their wars. Luckily for them, most veterans have been willing to oblige — keeping the darkest secrets of that war hidden (even while complaining that no one can really know what they went through).

The truth is, we don’t even know the full story of that war’s obscenity when it comes to the American experience. This, too, has been sanitized and swapped out for tales of combat horror or “realistic” accounts of the war in the boonies that focus on repulsive realities like soldiers stepping on shit-smeared punji sticks, suffering from crotch rot, or keeling over from dehydration. Such accounts, we’ve been assured, offer a more honest depiction of the horrors of war and the men who nobly bore them.

Don’t believe it.

As the narrator of Tim O’Brien’s “How to Tell a True War Story” puts it:

“A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil.”

Which brings us back to that rape on August 31, 1969.

Aside from Daniel Lang’s Casualties of War, a brilliantly-compact and harrowing account of the kidnap, gang-rape, and murder of a young Vietnamese girl (a New Yorkerarticle-turned-book-turned-movie), you’re not likely to encounter the story of the rape of a Vietnamese woman by Americans in “the literature.” And yet the sexual assault of civilians by GIs was far from uncommon, even if you can read thousands of books on the Vietnam War and have little inkling that it ever happened. Hints about the harassment or sexual assault of American women — nurses, enlisted women, and so-called Donut Dollies — also rarely make it into the histories. And you can read most, perhaps all, of those 30,000 books without ever coming across a case of GI-on-GI rape in Vietnam.

But that’s just what happened on that August 31st at a U.S. base in Vietnam’s far south, when three GI’s attacked a fellow American, a fellow soldier. For the purposes of this piece, we’ll call him Specialist Curtis. We know his story because the court martial records of one of his assailants, who was found guilty of and sentenced to prison time, made it to the National Archives where I found the document. But really, we know it because, according to the military judge presiding over the case, Curtis delivered “clear, strong, convincing, not halting, not hesitant, not reluctant, straight-forward, direct, willing, sincere, and not evasive” testimony. He and others told a brutal story, an obscene story — that is, a true war story.

What Veterans Won’t Tell You

Curtis was feeling sick that late summer day and wouldn’t drink with his hootch-mates, so they pounced on him, held his mouth open, and poured whisky down his throat. When he began to retch, they let him go and he ran outside to throw up. He returned to his bunk and they attacked him again. The cycle repeated itself twice more.

The last attempt to force Curtis to drink began with a threat. If he didn’t imbibe with them — “them” being a fellow specialist, a private first class, and a private — they swore they would anally rape him.

Curtis resisted.

In a flash, the three tore off his bed sheets and flipped him onto his stomach. They leaned on him to hold him down as he thrashed and bucked, while they ripped off his underwear. Then they smeared hand lotion all over his buttocks. As Curtis cried out for help, the private mounted him. He began to rape him and was heard to exclaim that it was “really good, it was tight.” After the private was finished, the private first class raped Curtis. The specialist followed. “I know you enjoy it,” Curtis heard one of them say before he blacked out from the pain. Across the hootch, another private watched the entire episode. Curtis had protested, he’d later say, but this soldier did nothing to intervene. He was, he later testified, “very scared” of the three attackers.

After Curtis regained consciousness, he retreated to the showers. When he finally returned to the hootch, the fellow specialist who raped him issued a threat. If he reported the attack, they would swear that he had paid them $20 each to have sex with him.

That’s a true war story.

And that’s a Vietnam War story that’s absent from our histories of the conflict — all 30,000 of them.

Given the stigma attached to rape, especially decades ago, and the added stigma attached to male rape victims, it’s shocking that the case ever became public, no less that it went to trial in a military court, or that the victim gave clear, graphic, painful testimony. The truth was out there, but no one ever told this story to the wider world — neither the victim, the perpetrators, the witnesses, the lawyers, the judge, the commanders at the base, nor a historian. You could read thousands of books on the Vietnam War — even books devoted to hidden histories, secrets, and the like — and never know that, in addition to rifles and rice paddies, war is also about rape, even male-on-male rape, even GI-on-GI rape. Just how many such rapes occurred, we’ll never know, because such acts were and generally still are kept secret.

Veterans don’t tell these stories. They almost never offer up accounts of murder, assault, torture, or rape unsolicited. They don’t want you to know. Such realities need to be mined out of them. I’ve done it for the last 10 years, and believe me, it can be exhausting.

Veterans, their advocates, and their defenders often tell us it’s never okay to ask if a soldier or marine killed somebody “over there.” But if veterans refuse to offer up unsanitized accounts of their wartime experiences and it’s improper for us to ask what they did, how can civilians be faulted for failing to understand war?

To set the historical record straight, I’ve traveled across the globe, walked into people’s homes, and asked them questions to which, in a better world than ours, no one should have to know the answers. I’ve asked elderly Vietnamese to recount the most horrific traumas imaginable. I’ve induced rivers of tears. I’ve sat impassively, taking notes as an older woman, bouncing her grandchild on her knee, told me what it was like to be raped with an American weapon.

As I said, war is obscene.

I also asked these questions of American veterans because — some notable and iconic exceptions aside — too few have had the courage of that Vietnamese grandmother. After all, some American raped her with that weapon, but as far as I know — and if anybody knew, it would probably be me — he never leveled with the American public about the true nature of his war. He never told the truth, publicly apologized, voiced regret, or even for that matter boasted about it, nor did he ever make a case for why raping a woman with a weapon was warranted in wartime. He kept it a secret and, if he’s still alive, continues to do so today. We all suffer for his silence.

On a single day in August 1969, on one base, three GIs raped a fellow American soldier. Three rapes. One day. What does that mean? What does it say about men? About the military? About war? We can’t know for sure because we’ll never know the whole truth of sexual assault in Vietnam. The men involved in wartime sex crimes — in raping Vietnamese women, in sodomizing them, in violating them with bottles and rifle muzzles, in sexually assaulting American women, in raping American men — have mostly remained silent about it.

One of the rapists in this case may have passed away, but at least one is still apparently alive in the United States. Maybe even on your street. For decades we knew nothing of their crimes, so we know less than we should about the Vietnam War and about war in general.

Maybe it’s time to start asking questions of our veterans. Hard questions. They shouldn’t be the only ones with the knowledge of what goes on in armies and in war zones. They didn’t get to Vietnam (or Iraq or Afghanistan) on their own and they shouldn’t shoulder the blame or the truth alone and in silence. We all bear it. We all need to hear it. The sooner, the better.